It was about the size of a tern, already fully human and attached by the umbilical cord to the placenta that followed it, a dark red clump of pure life. Something that had been life.
Josef shuffled backwards on his knees, banged into the coffee table, couldn"t take his eyes off what would have been his child. Its foetal sac had burst with the pressure, it had drowned in salt water.
He screamed until his vocal cords were on fire. He kept on screaming when his scream was nothing more than a hoa.r.s.e bark, when he saw the blood from Anna"s womb growing darker as Death removed itself. In the end there was only a foetus lying in a pool of blood. Two bodies on the floor. And a pool of water.
The pool of water retracted, forming itself into a thin, transparent rope.
Josef stopped screaming and stood there open-mouthed.
It could be outside...
The rope began to move towards the door. He laughed, but no sound came; he began to stamp on the rope. It split it two, ran across his foot, kept on going. He laughed, sobbed, kept on stamping, jumping on the rope, but it simply slipped away, reformed.
When it reached the door it slid out between the hinges.
He tried to grab it. It slipped out of his hands. He opened the door, ran after it down towards the sea. Just as the front end of the rope reached the water and slid in, he stumbled on the treacherous rocks and fell forwards.
He heard a crunching noise inside his head as some of his teeth smashed, and his mouth filled with blood.
He lay face down on the rocks until the dawn came.
What else is there to tell?
Anna survived. After a few days in hospital her physical recovery was complete. She didn"t even need a D and C. Death had done its job meticulously. She would never be able to have children.
The case featured in the papers for a week or so, and Josef got four years for contributing to the death of another person. A psychiatrist who had been working with Kaxe was able to confirm that he had strong suicidal tendencies, and that Josef"s version of events was not at all unlikely.
There was no mention of Death, which lives in the sea.
Anna visited Josef in prison a few times, but their relationship was untenable after what had happened. She said he shouldn"t blame himself, that it had been her own choice, but it didn"t help much. Josef was lost to the world.
After a couple of years Anna started painting again, taking up the thread she had begun in the days before the thing that had happened, but without the comic element. Things went well for her. She was never happy again, but she kept going.
When Josef came out of prison he went back to the house. Spent a few months sorting it out.
In prison he had had plenty of time to consider his impressions from the hours spent in the company of Death. In spite of the fact that he had striven for eternal life, it came as a relief when he realised that the immortality given to him through the pact applied only to death by water.
He would age, like other people. He could take his own life if he wanted to. But he would never drown.
The years pa.s.sed. Josef was unable to return to any kind of work. At the age of thirty-eight he was an old man, sitting in his cottage and living on benefits, drinking as much as he could.
The locals avoided him. They knew who he was, what he"d done. Perhaps their att.i.tude might have mellowed over the years if he hadn"t also stopped washing, stopped eating more than was absolutely necessary to stay alive.
One evening as he sat there, mercifully drunk, staring out at the lighthouse sending its flashes of light across the water as it had always done, he realised with a bitter laugh that he was becoming exactly like Kaxe.
Life lost more and more of its meaning. He was incapable of enjoying anything any longer. Even the booze didn"t help. In this desert the importance of his only oasis grew and grew, the reason why things had turned out like this, the only gift he had been given. The fact that he couldn"t drown.
One October day he fetched an anchor with a chain from the boathouse, heaved it into the boat and set off. He sailed to the same spot where he had sunk Kaxe. There he fastened the chain tightly around his waist with a lockable split pin so that he would be able to open it again once he was convinced.
When he threw himself into the water with the anchor, he felt a kind of happiness.
The water was cold. He quickly sank three metres below the surface, stopped. Floated. His ears popped and he equalised the pressure by holding his nose and breathing out with his lips pressed together. Above him he could see the silhouette of the underside of the boat, highlighted against the sky. Thought he had been stupid not to fasten himself to the boat as well. It would drift away.
He floated on the spot. After a minute or so he was no longer able to hold his breath. He opened his mouth and breathed in.
Whatever might come, let it come.
The water poured into his lungs, chilling him completely in just a few seconds. A moment of panic, the panic that always clings to life. But nothing happened. He was no longer breathing, but he was fully conscious.
He floated there for a long time. Saw the boat drift out of sight. Saw the sky begin to darken. He no longer had any feeling anywhere, he was merely a floating consciousness, a thinking jellyfish.
The full significance of this did not become clear to him until he had had enough. When he began to long for the cottage in spite of everything, for a few leisurely gla.s.ses of schnapps to thaw his body out slowly. For TV.
He had no feeling. He couldn"t move.
Therefore he couldn"t open the split pin.
A few hours into the night, as the billowing stars shone through the surface of the water just three metres above him, his mind gave up. A soft, sparkling madness closed around him.
But he was alive. And he would remain alive.
Forever.
Let the old dreams die.
(For Mia. Still.).
I want to tell you a story about a great love.
Unfortunately the story isn"t about me, but I am part of it, and now it"s all over I want to bear witness for Stefan and Karin.
Bear witness. That sounds a bit grand, I know. Perhaps I am creating exaggerated expectations about a story that is not in any way sensational, but miracles are so few and far between in this world that you have to do your best to make the most of them when they do appear.
I regard the love between Stefan and Karin as a miracle, and it is to this miracle that I want to bear witness. You can call it an everyday miracle or a conventional one, I don"t care. Through getting to know them I was privileged to be part of something that goes beyond our earthbound constraints. Which makes it a miracle. That"s all.
First of all, a little about me. Have patience.
I am part of the original population of Blackeberg. The cement was still drying when my parents and I moved to Sigrid Undsets gata in 1951. I was seven years old at the time, and all I really remember is that we had to trudge all the way down to Islandstorget to catch the tram if we wanted to go into town. The subway came the following year. I followed the building of the station"s ticket hall, designed by none other than Peter Celsing, which is still a source of pride for many of us old Blackeberg residents.
I mention this because I actually spent a considerable portion of my life in this very station. In 1969 I began work as a ticket collector, and I stayed there until I retired two years ago. So apart from odd periods spent filling in for colleagues who were off sick from other stations along the green line, I have spent thirty-nine years of my working life inside Celsing"s creation.
There are plenty of stories I could tell, and it"s not that I haven"t thought about doing so. I enjoy writing, and a modest little autobiography of a ticket collector might well find an audience. But this is not the appropriate forum. I just wanted to tell you a little bit about myself, so that you know who"s telling the story. The anecdotes can wait.
I"ve heard it said that I am a person who lacks ambition. In a way this is true, if by "ambition" you mean a desire to climb the career ladder or the staircase of status or whatever you want to call it. But ambition can be so many things. My ambition, for example, has been to live a quiet, dignified life, and I believe I have succeeded.
I would probably have fitted in much better in Athens about two thousand five hundred years ago. I would have made an excellent Stoic, and much of the att.i.tude to life I have been able to understand from the writings of Plato fits me like a glove. Perhaps I would have been regarded as a wise man in those days. Nowadays I tend to be regarded as a bore. That"s life, as Vonnegut says.
I have dedicated my life to selling and punching tickets, and to reading. There"s plenty of time to read when you work in the ticket office, particularly when you work nights as I have often done. Dostoevsky and Beckett are probably my favourites because both of them, although in very different ways, attempt to reach a point of- Sorry, there I go again. "Stillness", I was going to say, but this is not the place to expand on my literary preferences. Enough about me, and over to Stefan and Karin.
Oh, but there must be just one more little diversion. Perhaps after all I was a little too ambitious in the conventional sense when I said I"d like to write my autobiography. I seem to find it difficult to organise my material. Oh well. You"ll just have to put up with it, because I need to say a few words about Oskar Eriksson.
I don"t know if you remember the case, but it attracted a great deal of attention and an enormous amount was written about it at the time, particularly out here to the west of the city. It"s twenty-eight years ago now, and thank goodness nothing so tragic and violent has happened in Blackeberg since then.
A lunatic in the guise of a vampire killed three children in the old swimming baths-which is now a pre-school-and then abducted this Oskar Eriksson. The newspapers wallowed in what had happened for weeks and weeks, and many of those who were around at the time can barely hear the word "Blackeberg" without thinking of vampires and ma.s.s murder. What do you think of when I say "Sjobo"? Integration and tolerance? No, I thought not. Places acquire a stigma, which then sits there like a nail stuck in your foot for years on end.
A lunatic in the guise of a vampire, I wrote, because I wanted to remind you of the image that was prevalent. However, I have had good reason to revise the account of what took place, but we"ll get to that eventually.
What does this have to do with Stefan and Karin?
Well, the reason they moved to Blackeberg was that Karin was a police officer, and one of those responsible for the investigation into what was known as "the Swimming Pool Ma.s.sacre in Blackeberg". To be more specific, she was actually involved in the section working on Oskar Eriksson"s disappearance. Her enquiries meant that she spent a great deal of time in Blackeberg and she became very fond of the place, in spite of everything.
When she and her husband Stefan were looking for somewhere new to live a couple of years after the investigation had been put on the back burner, they came to Blackeberg, and so it was that they ended up moving into an apartment two doors down from me on Holbergsgatan in June 1987.
Under normal circ.u.mstances people come and go in the apartment blocks near me without my taking any notice at all. Even though I"ve lived here a long time, I"m not one of those who keeps an eye on things. But that summer I spent a lot of time on my balcony-I was ploughing through Proust"s In Search of Lost Time-and I noticed the new arrivals for one very simple reason: they held hands with each other.
I estimated that the man was about my own age, and the woman a few years older-so well past the stage where most couples abandon that kind of physical closeness in public. There are exceptions, of course, but these days it seems as if not even young people bother holding hands any longer, at least not if they"re over the age of ten.
But as soon as this middle-aged couple set foot outside the door they took each other by the hand, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Sometimes of course they were alone, and they didn"t always hold hands when they were walking together, but almost always. It made me feel happy, somehow, and I caught myself looking up from my book as soon as I heard their door open.
Perhaps it"s a drawback of my profession, but I am in the habit of studying people, trying to guess who they are and putting two and two together from the various occasions on which I have the opportunity to observe them from my ticket booth.
Since the couple spent a great deal of time on their ground floor balcony that summer, I had plenty of chances to gather facts in order to draw my conclusions.
They often read aloud to one another, a virtually obsolete form of entertainment. The distance prevented me from hearing what they were reading, and I had to stop myself from fetching my binoculars when they left a book on the table. There is a difference between observation and spying. When a pair of binoculars enters the picture, that line has been crossed. So no binoculars.
They drank a fair amount of red wine, and they both smoked. One of them would roll a cigarette while the other was reading. Sometimes they stayed up quite late with a ca.s.sette player on the table between them. From what I could hear, they played mainly popular old songs. Siw Malmquist, osten Warnerbring, Gunnar Wiklund. That kind of thing. And Abba. Lots of Abba.
Occasionally they would dance together for a little while in the limited s.p.a.ce available, but when that happened I would look away and busy myself with my own affairs, because it felt as if that was private in a way I can"t really explain.
OK. Let me tell you what conclusions I drew before I got to know them. I thought the man worked in some kind of service industry, and the woman was a librarian. I decided they had met at a mature age, and this was their first apartment together. I felt they had both had their own dreams, but now those dreams had been put on ice so that they could invest their energy in their relationship, their love.
Not bad, as you will see.
I was completely wrong on just one point, as you already know. The woman was a police officer, not a librarian. If someone had asked me to describe my idea of a female police officer, I would probably have said something about short black hair, prominent cheekbones and sinewy muscles. Karin didn"t look like that. She had thick, fair hair that hung right down her back; she was comparatively short and very pretty in an appealing way, with lots of laughter lines. Just the kind of person you would happily ask for advice about which book to read next, in fact.
You could ask Karin that question, of course, but if she were really to be on home ground you would have to ask her about the development of scar tissue, the psychology of murderers and the density of ammunition in handguns. Her area of particular expertise was interrogating witnesses and the verbal collection of information, but she was also well versed in ballistics and blood-spatter a.n.a.lysis. "Although that"s mainly just as a hobby," as she once explained.
I found out what Stefan did for a living at the same time as our embryonic friendship began.
After the Proust I turned to a biography of Edvard Munch. I had just finished it when my holiday started at the end of July, and I decided to take a trip to Oslo to visit the Munch museum. That"s one of the advantages of being alone. You get an idea, and the very next day you can put it into practice.
I took the morning train so as to arrive in the afternoon, and when the ticket collector came along, who should I see decked out in his cap and full uniform but my new neighbour? So we had more or less the same profession. A profession that definitely counts as part of a service industry, wouldn"t you say?
As I held out my ticket he frowned and looked at me as if he were searching for something. I helped him out.
"We"re neighbours," I said. "And I"m on the ticket barrier at the station. In Blackeberg."
"That"s it," he said, punching my ticket. "Thanks for telling me. I"d have been wondering all day otherwise."
There was a brief silence. I felt as if I wanted to say something more, but I couldn"t come up with anything that wouldn"t seem intrusive. I could hardly ask what books they read, or which was his favourite Abba track. He came to my rescue with the only neutral fact available at the time.
"So," he said. "You"re off to Oslo?"
"Yes. I thought I"d go and have a look round the Munch museum. I"ve never been."
He nodded to himself, and I wondered if I should have specified Edvard. Perhaps he had no interest in art. So it came as a bit of surprise when he asked, "The Kiss. Have you seen that one?"
"Yes. But not the real thing."
"That"s in the museum."
He looked as if he were about to say something else, but the pa.s.senger in front of me was waving his ticket. The man I would later come to know as Stefan clicked his hole punch a couple of times in the air and said, "It"s a wonderful museum. Enjoy yourself," then carried on with his rounds.
When I visited the museum the following day I couldn"t avoid paying particular attention to The Kiss, especially as it was already one of my favourites. As I have already said I have a tendency to speculate, and it was impossible not to interpret the painting in the light of what I thought I knew about my hand-holding neighbours.
It"s more a matter of two bodies melting together, rather than a kiss. On the one hand the painting depicts the kiss above all other kisses, the union that makes two drift together and become one. On the other hand the painting is very dark, and there is something tortured about the position of the bodies, as if we are witnessing something inexorable and painful. Whatever it"s about, it shows two people who are completely absorbed in one another and who have ceased to exist as separate individuals.
I thought I had learned something about my neighbours, but at the same time I told myself not to read too much into it. After all, even I had liked the picture, and I was all alone.
One amusing detail I would like to mention, in the light of what happened later: I spent a long time standing in front of the painting ent.i.tled Vampire. Here again we have a kind of kiss, bodies melting together. But is this about consolation, or a fatal bite? Is the woman"s red hair enveloping the man in oblivion and forgiveness, or is it actually blood flowing? At any rate, we see the same faceless individuals as in The Kiss, the same blind and tortured symbiosis.
A few days after my return from Oslo, I pa.s.sed the balcony where Stefan was sitting reading Dostoevsky"s The Idiot. It would have been impolite not to speak, so I said something and he said something about Dostoevsky and I said something about Munch and he asked if I"d like a cup of coffee and that was how it started. To cut a long story short, there were more cups of coffee on other days, and in September I was invited to dinner.
I must apologise for this lengthy detour to Oslo with the sole aim of explaining how our friendship started, but as I said: with hindsight it doesn"t seem to me to be entirely without significance. The end was already encapsulated in the beginning, so to speak.
It was easy to spend time with Stefan and Karin. We had similar interests, and more importantly the same sense of humour. Like me they enjoyed turning ideas and orthodoxies inside out, and for example we could spend a considerable amount of time speculating on what would happen if islands weren"t fixed, but just floated around. How those in power would formulate their immigration policy, and so on and so on.
One evening when we were sitting on the balcony sharing a bottle of wine, I asked how they had met. They suddenly looked quite secretive, and glanced at one another with an expression that suggested they might be sharing a private joke. Eventually Karin said, "We met...during the course of the investigation."
"What investigation?"
"The one in Blackeberg."
"The swimming pool...incident?"
"Yes. Stefan was a witness and I interviewed him."
"A witness?" I looked at Stefan. "But you weren"t living here then, were you?"
Stefan glanced at Karin as if he was requesting permission to talk about an ongoing investigation, and she gave a brief nod.
"Oskar Eriksson," said Stefan. "I punched his ticket. On the train. The day after it all happened. So I was kind of the last person who definitely saw him."